One of the best things about modern operating systems like Mac OS X and Windows 7 and 8 is that search, particularly PDF search, is built right in. You don’t need to have a third party tool to search the contents of a searchable PDF – the OS will do it for you.

That is, unless you are running the 64-bit version of Windows 7 or Windows 8.

It is fairly common for DocumentSnap readers to write in with questions/problems, but it is pretty handy when a reader writes in with both the problem and the solution, which is exactly what superstar DocumentSnap reader Matt did recently.

Matt had a problem: He was scanning all these OCR’ed PDFs, but Windows Search was not finding them when he typed a keyword in the document. It would only find it if he typed in the name of a file, which pretty much defeats the purpose of Optical Character Recognition. Not having a Windows machine at the time I was flying blind, but we went back and forth and eventually he figured out what the issue was: an iFilter (but I am getting ahead of myself here).

What Is 64 Bit Windows And Do I Have It?

There are basically two types of Windows: 32-bit and 64-bit. I’ll let Microsoft describe the difference:

The terms 32-bit and 64-bit refer to the way a computer’s processor (also called a CPU), handles information. The 64-bit version of Windows handles large amounts of random access memory (RAM) more effectively than a 32-bit system.

It used to be that only high-end computers were 64-bit, but that has changed. This cheap Acer laptop I am writing this on is 64-bit, for example. How can you tell which kind of Windows you have?

On Windows 7:

Click the Start button.

Right-click on Computer, choose Properties.

You will see an entry for System Type which will give you the information that you need.

On Windows 8:

Open the Control Panel.

Click/Tap System/Security

Click/Tab System

There’ll be an entry for System type that will say 64 or 32 bits

If you are having problems with PDF search and your System type says 32-bit, you can probably stop reading. This post likely won’t help you.

What Is The Problem?

Windows 7 and 8’s search capabilities are pretty good, but for some reason the 64-bit has a problem indexing PDF files. Windows Search uses something called an iFilter to help it index files, and the PDF iFilter for 64-bit Windows is missing. (This probably applies to 64-bit Vista and 64-bit XP too).

Here is how to tell if you have the problem:

Click on the Start Menu and choose Control Panel

Change View By to Small Icons and click on Indexing Options

Click on the Advanced button

Click on the File Types tab

Scroll way down to pdf and you will probably see Registered IFilter Is Not Found

If you see that message, you have the iFilter problem.

As an additional test, download or scan a searchable PDF. You can see here that I am searching for the word “Westminster” in Acrobat Reader and it is finding it. When I search using the search box under the Start menu, it doesn’t find it.

Replace The Missing IFilter

When the installer completes, go back and look at the file types list from above. It should now say “PDF Filter” instead of the “Registered IFilter Is Not Found” message. Yeah!

Test The New iFilter

Download or scan a new searchable PDF and find a word that is in the text and search on it in Acrobat Reader. For example, here I searched for the word “idyll”.

Now I will search for it in Windows Search, and it looks like it found it. Double Yeah!

Now lets search for Westminster again:

Looks like it still didn’t find it. No!

It turns out that fixing the iFilter will only fix new documents, not the one that Windows Search has already indexed.

Do A Re-Index

In order to fix this problem, we’ll need to tell Windows 7 or Windows 8 to do a re-index. If you have a large hard drive, this could take a long time, so do it before you are going to bed or something.

Click on the Start Menu and choose Control Panel

Change View By to Small Icons and click on Indexing Options

Click the Advanced button

On the Indexing Settings tab, hit Rebuild

Once this is done, let’s try searching for Westminster again. Hopefully third time’s the charm?

It’s there!

I’m On Windows 8 And This Still Doesn’t Work

Believe it or not, in some cases there is a bug with Adobe Acrobat that breaks search in Windows 8. These guys.

I'm re-indexing as I type this…..I just started going paperless this week (with a scansnap S1300 I got on eBay for just over $200) and was puzzled by the inability of search to function the way I expected it to. Well, problem solved! I am glad I subscribed to the RSS feed.

@smallbizdoer @Tom Glad it helped and I'm glad Matt let me know about a problem I didn't even know I had yet. I have a feeling this is pretty widespread now that 64-bit Windows 7 is all over the place. Hope this post spreads far and wide to help people.

Just great, ty.
There is, however, a problem I'm facing with it. When I search for a all (complete) word, windows search does find it inside the pdf file…but it misses it when a search for, lets say, just part of that same word…like the last 6 chars …or the first 5…or some 4 chars in the middle of the word.
And I'm sure that those same searchs did work fine in the past, before I got my W7 box.
Any tips about how to fix this?
Thank you in advance

Another alternative I've been using for a year or two on my Win7 64 setup is Foxit iFilter. I was reluctant to go back to Acrobat for pdf (I use NitroPDF Reader) so was pleased when I found Foxit had an iFilter. The server version costs several hundred dollars but you can sign up for the Basic Desktop Version via the free trial page. Its more like free than free trial. http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/ifilter/register…

Thank you. I'd already found the 'Registered Ifilter not found' problem and was about to tear my hair out. I've just finished writing a PhD thesis. I have thousands of references and had been remiss in storing some (OK a lot) of them in EndNote. The thought of wading through each pdf file was enough to make me walk away from the whole thing. I couldn't believe it when I googled the problem and there you were with the solution. So thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Sounds like a great solution. Seems very simple. Problem now is that any and all links to the Adobe download all lead to the same URL (http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4025). However, that URL goes only to a blank page. Even navigating to it through the Adobe website leads to the same blank page. Any suggestions?

Now my problem is that I also can't search vsd files. These are my visio drawings and, since graphics is my main function, I need this desperately. Have you come across this problem before? Thanks for any help you can offer.

Wow. That indexing problem drove me crazy yesterday. Spent hours trying to fix it. Thanks to Brooks and Matt, it took 3 minutes to fix today. I'm sold. Thanks, guys. I thought it was a ScanSnap issue. Turned out to be a Windows 64 bit problem.

Thank you, that is a lifesaver. I'm currently working on my literature review for my dissertation proposal and have been going nuts trying to find PDF files using the search feature on my new computer, which is Windows 7. I could search and find them on the old computer using XP but it is slow and clunky and doesn't have all the resources.

I had the same problem on windows 8 – 64 bit. Spent a lot of frustrating time coming to the same conclusions as I see here – Went through all the normal troubleshooting attempts as well. I just installed version 11 of the ifilter, changed the patch statement and after a reboot and the reindex all my tests work!! Brooks had sent me the link to this post – it was right on the money! I wish that it was mentioned somewhere it the installation instructions for scansnap. Thanks again Brooks!

Your PDF Search fix for Windows 7 64-bit is great! However, I have another issue. I have PDF files that were created with keywords in file properties and I need to search for those keywords using Explorer. Open .pdf file and select File > Properties ‘Keywords’. Can you help?

iX500… got the windows search in organizer to finally work with Fujitsu tech. Windows 7, had to reindex etc etc.

What we could not get to work is if I pick Adobe instead of Windows Search in the organizer. When I use that option in the search, adobe acrobat/reader opens, then quickly closes and I get (0) search results.

Anyone know whats up? I do have the iFilter v9 installed. I also have Acrobat X Pro and Reader 11 installed.

To summarize: Go to my computer then go to organize on the top left and select folder and search options. The only option I needed to change was the top one “Always search file name and contents” and I could then searched network drives.

We use Foxit Reader on a remote access network (Windows 8 server). All of the tips worked perfectly on our local workstations, but not on the network. Foxit says we have to pay $800 plus to be able to use their ifilter to search contents on the network. We are currently on 30-day free trial and it works, but is there a cheaper alternative?

Sounds like a good solution but i use annother alternative which is called Lookeen. I use it daily and in my opinion the add-on is faster than the built-in version. U can try it on http://www.lookeen.com

None of these steps worked for me UNTIL I deleted the c:\index folder. Of course, you can’t do that unless you’re in safe mode.

Once it’s gone, and you reboot into normal mode, the “file types” menu is completely blank. It causes a bit of panic, but after it gets done rebuilding the index (over 600k items in my case), they all return. And, from then on every PDF is searchable.

I followed your steps to the letter, including re-indexing (over 20K files!), but my problem persists. When I do a search, it pulls up the first instance immediately, and then after scanning the entire document, that very same instance is repeated, in this example, about 70 some times: it actually finds one instance for **every single character (including spaces!)** in the phrase I am searching for. I can run the exact same search on my Win7 32-bit laptop and the search function works perfectly. On my new Win7 64-bit desktop, it sucks big time. I use my desktop for all of my publishing work, and not having the ability to search properly in PDFs is a real hazard in my line of work.

Thanks for your detailed step-by-step fix, I just wish it had worked in my case.
Cheers.

Follow-up comment: Your step-by-step, I believe, is for Adobe 9. We’re now up to version 11 — and I’m guessing somewhere between the 10 through 11 update something else changed such that your step-by-step doesn’t work for Win 7 64-bit machines. Ah, well…

I have, however, found a free-use application: FoxIt Reader — which does exactly the type of search that I need (and that Adobe Reader use to do). So my problem is solved, so to speak. It would just be nice if the Adobe search functioned correctly.

I can’t speak to network users — but, I’m *not* using FoxIt Editor, just the Reader, which so far is free to install and there doesn’t even seem to be a trial period. Regardless, I desperately need a PDF search tool that works, and FoxIt does, so I guess I’ll see what happens going forward.

Thank you for the tip. It is really useful.
However, I would like to clarify that the PDF search issue in 64-bit Windows is not a problem in Windows due to some reason. Adobe clearly states in the iFilter download page that “Adobe currently bundles a 32-bit PDF iFilter with Adobe Acrobat® 11 as well as the free Adobe Reader® 11 software. It uses the Microsoft iFilter interface and allows third-party indexing tools to extract text from Adobe PDF files.”.
So, the problem is that Adobe does not bundle iFilter in 64-bit Adobe Reader, so it is required to download iFilter manually.